Category Archives: Communication

Social Media can be a recipe for disaster if approached carelessly. The speed of the Internet allows us to broadcast our emotions to a vast public, without any structural barrier between our feelings of the moment and the social consequences of making them public. When the private sphere leaks out into the public arena, things…

It is in the nature of storytelling to inevitably express a point of view, since we simply cannot detach from our own self. There is however a basic difference between an honest narrative (and fiction always falls into this category) and a flat-out lie. Expressing an opinion is one thing, even if we are doing…

Storytelling did not start with books. It started with cave paintings, whispers around a fire and probably dancing far into the night to the sound of drums or just about any hollow instrument that could produce a noise. As humanity, we have told stories to represent, recall and shape reality from the very first moments…

I love literature. I also love genres like fantasy and science fiction, which seem to suffer from the stigma of being considered “paraliterature”, as if no true artistic relevance could be found outside the closed borders of realistic fiction. This prejudice against genre literature, which also includes mystery and crime novels, is pretty much absurd…

The message, in Roman Jakobson’s Theory of Communication, is what you want to communicate to the receiving end of the conversation. The Romans used the words of Cato the Elder to describe its importance: Rem tene, verba sequentur – grasp the concept, and the words will follow. Albert Einstein delved even deeper in the importance of being able to…

The voice (or tone) of a brand, in marketing terminology, is very close to the element defined as the the Addresser (also known as Emitter, or Source), the origin of communication, by the Theory of Communication. Typically in everyday conversation we have no specific need to focus on the relationship between our words and our personal individuality: a…

The Receiver is the person (or people) we are addressing with our communication. Empathy is the best skill to apply when considering our audience, and is defined as the ability to understand a perspective or point of view different from our own. This should not be summarily confused with sympathy or compassion: we are not…

Irony is defined as the ability to say one thing while meaning another. It’s a subtle technique that implies the risk of not being immediately grasped by the audience, while providing an immensely powerful tool for communication by tapping into the mutual understanding and interpretation of context. Not surprisingly, the use of irony is an…

The Code, in Roman Jakobson’s Theory of Communication, is the framework of rules determining how we compose our message. It’s a necessary element providing meaning to the exchange, as long as there is a mutual understanding of the code in use. The easiest way to look at the code is to consider it in terms of language;…

The Channel is the medium where communication occurs, and its importance can hardly be overestimated. Along with the Code, this element strongly contributes to whether the message will be understood and the purpose of the conversation achieved. Every channel has developed over time its own set of rules and best practices, so code and channel share a very…